Immigrant Business Owners Make Huge Contributions to our Economy

A new Office of Advocacy study by Robert Fairlie, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, shows that immigrant business owners make huge contributions to our economy.  Specifically, it finds that “immigrants are nearly 30 percent more likely to start a business than nonimmigrants, and they represent 16.7 percent of all new business owners.”  In some states, over 30 percent of all business start-ups are from immigrants.  When combined with the work of Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University, who along with his co-authors shows that 25 percent of all high-technology companies were started by immigrants, we get a true sense of the contributions of the immigrant community in the U.S.  Above all, as I argued in my most recent paper, policymakers need to pay greater attention to the legal immigration of these highly-skilled employees, many of whom will become entrepreneurs.

Professor Fairlie’s paper will be released on November 12 at an event at the Minority Business Development Agency.  A panel of discussants includes James Spletzer of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute.